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Zenya’s Next Gen Keyword & Categorization Platform

The case could easily be made that keyword list construction is the most vital part of the paid search marketing process. Yes, optimization is clearly a crucial component to profitable SEM, yet without the right keywords (and campaign/ad group structure), the chance for success drops dramatically.

So, wouldn’t you think that after more than a decade of search marketing and literally tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone in paid search ad revenue, that someone would come along and actually build a powerful keyword generation tool?

Yes, there have been attempts in the past, and there are some handy tools out on the market today, but the general consensus with most search marketers is that these platforms are not all-inclusive.

They are simply pieces that still need much more manual manipulation to build stand alone keyword lists and groups. For our own clients, my team and I manually aggregate multiple keyword tools in order to put together what we feel is the most comprehensive list available.

Well, there’s a new player in the market. Billing themselves as “the world’s most intelligent keyword and categorization platform”, the Chicago-based technology vendor, Zenya, feels they have cracked the puzzle.

I met their founder and CEO, Stephen Scarr, a little over a month ago at an industry event put on by Marin Software. Talk about passion! Stephen could barely contain his excitement for what he believes is the best keyword building tool on the market. (Note: he is also one of the brains behind Info.com which he co-founded in 1999.)

Zenya has spent the last three years developing a sophisticated system of categorization that maps searcher intent of more than 600 million categorized keywords and growing.

Zenya’s first dedicated team included taxonomists, subject-matter experts, and structured data analysts who collaborated to build an entirely new taxonomy from scratch, one designed to cater to the unique needs of online advertising. Today, Zenya’s categorization algorithm can process more than ten thousands keywords every second with a database of over 1.4 billion keywords.

“Overwhelming demand for a better way to identify productive keywords led us to develop Zenya,” Stephen avidly explains. “Since the inception of search engine marketing, advertisers have constantly struggled with the time-consuming and arduous process of keyword research. Using available keywords tools, marketers spend countless hours identifying relevant keywords to create Ad campaigns of tightly themed categories (topics).”

To assist digital marketers, info.com conceived Zenya to create the world’s first repository of categorized keywords, making the keyword building task that could last days or weeks, take just minutes.”

The folks at Zenya believe there are three core values that search marketers will discover with their product:

To Save Time. Rather than spending weeks creating keyword lists, marketers can download thousands of relevant keywords in seconds.

To Gain Control. Using the category tree or advanced filters, Zenya customers can constrain and focus their results to pinpoint relevant intent and connect with customers.

To Achieve Insight. Marketers can make sense of unstructured keyword data and categorize entire keyword portfolios into more than 250,000 categories.

Sound good? Well, let’s take a closer look at the product.

Take a look at the filters available for the current search of men’s shoes. You can exclude different things such as adult terms and branded terms or add your own minus (negative) ones. You can filter by category, intent, language, etc.

One of the more interesting filters is user intent. Zenya’s advanced categorization allows users to zero in on the types of terms that demonstrate various levels of the purchase funnel.

Categorical analysis is also very crucial to proper paid search. Using the categorical filters, users can better groups their keywords and develop granular messaging. Check out the keyword and category matches for the query cellphone plans.

Zenya has a variable pricing plan based on a points system. Users can opt-in at various levels to meet their needs.

Needless to say, Zenya is new to market and definitely has room to grow. For example, currently available as a consulting service, another feature in development is an automated gap analysis. This enables marketers to map their keywords sets to Zenya’s taxonomy of more than 250,000 categories and then source additional keywords in these categories as method of efficient campaign expansion.

As the paid search industry grows, so do the opportunities for vendors to garner budgetary dollars. Zenya is another platform that search pros should do their homework on and see if it should be another tool to add to their SEM toolbox.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Josh Dreller has been a search marketer since 2003 with a focus on SEM technology. As a media technologist fluent in the use of leading industry systems, Josh stays abreast of cutting edge digital marketing and measurement tools to maximize the effect of digital media on business goals. He has a deep passion to monitor the constantly evolving intersection between marketing and technology. You can follow him on Twitter at @mediatechguy.